Trump circled her photo and scrawled “The Face of a Dog!”

James Hamblin at the Atlantic has more details about Trump the man. I figure everybody should keep recycling them non-stop so that nobody will forget them.

Hamblin focuses on the question whether Trump is really a psychopath, and says let’s talk about NPD instead.

One psychologist, Ben Michaelis, called Trump “textbook Narcissistic Personality Disorder.” Psychologist George Simon called Trump “so classic that I’m archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example of his characteristics.”

Then he says no actually let’s talk about Antisocial Personality Disorder.

According to the DSM, Antisocial Personality Disorder should be diagnosed in a person who meets two criteria about the way they function in the world, and criteria about their personal traits. In the realm of the latter, the person must also demonstrate two other traits: antagonism and disinhibition.

That certainly fits Trump well, doesn’t it. That is in fact why he’s such a terrifying candidate.

Self-direction: Goal-setting based on personal gratification; absence of prosocial internal standards associated with failure to conform to lawful or culturally normative ethical behavior.

Trump is rather candid about these points. He is rich and powerful, and his business endeavors are primarily undertaken to achieve that end. “I don’t lose! I’ve never been a loser. I like to win!”

And that’s how he sees the world – as winners and losers, with the winners deserving all the spoils and the losers deserving poverty, contempt, and banishment.

Then there’s dominance.

Using dominance or intimidation to control others, though, shows up time and again in Trump’s history. He has done this particularly to journalists, and entire newspapers and magazines. In one incident, he sent The New York Times’ Gail Collins a copy of her column, having circled her photo and scrawled “The Face of a Dog!”

That should be all anyone needs to know about him. Socially he’s another Milo Yiannopoulos, and he shouldn’t be allowed within a thousand miles of any political office.

That BuzzFeed article by McKay Coppins is a great read. I remember seeing it after it came out, as well as a Gawker article on the attacks Coppins experiences afterward. Attacks which Breitbart — the site that went on to be an unofficial media arm of the Trump campaign — dutifully publicized without question.

Coppins’ claim that Trump wasn’t serious about running for office has turned out to be wrong, but it was an understandable conclusion at the time after all the false alarms over the years. And you can see the hints of the strategy Trump would use of being as provocative as possible to get media attention.

And this bit has always struck me as insightful in explaining why so many ordinary Americans identify with such a clown:

The day after the 2012 election, I spoke with one of Trump’s confidantes about his political appeal to working-class men in flyover country. “If you have no education, and you work with your hands, you like him,” the confidante told me. “It’s like, ‘Wow, if I was rich, that’s how I would live!’ The girls, the cars, the fancy suits. His ostentatiousness is appealing to them.”

It’s like that expression “a stupid person’s idea of a clever person,” which Google advises me was said of Stephen Fry, though my first encounter with it was Paul Krugman saying it of Newt Gingrinch.

Coppins wrote another piece recently that is a pretty fascinating follow-up.